How we get there matters
Achieving excellence and great results are important to us, and how we get there matters. Our values help us attract and retain talented employees, build client loyalty, and contribute to the bottom line.
Our values
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Integrity
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We honor our commitments and never compromise our ethics
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Compassion
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We consider what it's like to walk in the shoes of the people we serve and those with whom we work
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Relationships
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We build trust through collaboration
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Innovation
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We invest in the future and learn from the past
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Performance
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We demonstrate excellence in everything we do
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It’s personal
We rely upon information to do our work — and to help make the health system work better. Much of the information we rely upon to do our work reflects personal episodes in the lives of real people. And we know if that information is not handled properly, the damage to us, to our clients, and to the confidence of patients is real.
We honor and respect the personal nature of this information, and we’re proud of the trust we are given.
We have attained independent certification of our security procedures through CyberTrust, a global information security services company, by demonstrating that we meet widely recognized and accepted measures to safeguard information assets. OptumInsight has implemented policies, procedures and training in order to comply with the standards of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule and Security Rule.
Privacy and security statement
OptumInsight and its products support customers' internal HIPAA compliance programs. OptumInsight products are designed such that use of those products will not cause an otherwise HIPAA-compliant program to become non-compliant.
OptumInsight is a Hybrid Entity, under HIPAA definitions, due to the variety of products and services OptumInsight has to offer customers. OptumInsight clearinghouse services and provider billing services are sometimes considered activities of a covered entity and sometimes performed as a business associate to other covered entities. OptumInsight is also considered a business associate for many of its products and services when covered entity customers such as a health plan, self-insured employer group, or health care provider grant OptumInsight access to their protected health information (PHI) in order to perform services for the covered entity. OptumInsight has entered into appropriate business associate agreements with its covered entity customers from which it receives patient identifiable data.
OptumInsight has appointed OptumInsight compliance liaisons, who are representatives from each OptumInsight business unit. OptumInsight compliance and the business unit liaisons implemented the initial compliance requirements of the Privacy Rule and Security Rule and continue to maintain existing compliance procedures as well as implement new compliance requirements. In addition, the liaisons act as resources on HIPAA privacy and security issues within their business units. Each business unit compliance liaison is responsible for coordinating HIPAA privacy and security requirements in their area.
OptumInsight has also appointed a security team that is responsible for informing employees of security policies and procedures, providing security guidelines for new tools and techniques to maintain compliance, managing and controlling dissemination of security information, and maintaining maximum compliance with incident response and security patch management actions.
Education and awareness
OptumInsight employees have completed a three-tiered privacy awareness training program. The first tier requires all OptumInsight employees to understand the basic principles of privacy. The second tier centers on privacy and HIPAA-related policies. The third tier focuses on privacy procedures specific to each OptumInsight business unit. New OptumInsight employees complete the training promptly. All employees receive ongoing training.
OptumInsight has also implemented a two-tiered security awareness training program. The first tier requires all OptumInsight employees to understand the basic principles of security. The second tier involves security awareness training and additional technical training for our information technology staff. Employees receive ongoing training.
Protected health information
OptumInsight has developed a methodology that allows the performance of certain research, analysis and other services using data that is "de-identified" under HIPAA, rather than patient-identifiable "protected health information." OptumInsight has worked with recognized industry experts on de-identification methodology to comply with HIPAA requirements.
OptumInsight stores customers' patient-identifiable medical information in secure computer systems with strict access controls. Access to the data is permitted only as needed to perform company responsibilities. In addition, OptumInsight employs administrative, physical, and technical security controls to maintain the confidentiality of customer data.
Transactions, code sets, and identifiers
OptumInsight closely monitors new codes, formats, and identifiers as they are defined by new regulations. As new identifiers, codes and formats are finalized, our products and services will respond to the new industry requirements.
Our leading-edge health care transactions platform, ENS Health-e Exchange, offers a single interface to conduct all HIPAA-defined transactions between payers and providers nationally, minimizing paper-intensive and labor-intensive processes.
Outside of OptumInsight clearinghouse and provider billing services, many OptumInsight customers send data to OptumInsight for research or analytical purposes. HIPAA has not defined a standard transaction for research or analytics, so OptumInsight will continue to accept the transaction formats our customers use to send data to OptumInsight.
Last updated October 2011
Enhancing the affordability and quality of care
Applied at the right time and in the right place, when decisions need to be made, information can enhance the affordability, quality, usability, and accessibility of care.
Our transparency forum
Performance measurement is critical to achieving durable health reform that truly improves cost and quality of care by enabling value-based purchasing and performance-based incentives. Yet performance measurement poses one of the biggest challenges in the U.S. health care industry: What elements make up a fair, accepted system for assessing the quality and efficiency of care provided to patients?
To that end, OptumInsight has opened an online forum for public review of the methodologies behind our patented Episode Treatment Groups® (ETG®) and Procedure Episode Groups® (PEG®). We believe this is an important contribution to advancing the national performance measurement conversation. Now, any interested stakeholder can access, understand, and potentially improve our leading methodologies for grouping episodes of care.
We believe this is a critical step. Care purchasers — governments, health plans, and patients — demand increased transparency into the cost, quality, and service delivered by physicians and hospitals. Meanwhile, physicians and hospitals need and deserve insight into the means by which they are measured.
Meaningful engagement from multiple constituents is essential to the development of an industry-wide measurement system that is standard and trusted. We invite you to participate in this discussion.
Join the discussion at www.optuminsight.com/transparency/